Goosebumps: The Game

True Achievements turned 10 years old this month and as part of this event, they threw out a community challenge to spell out HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRUEACHIEVEMENTS using the first letter of the names of achievements. I tried from the outset to do this with my current games in progress – which gave me new hope for completing FIFA 08 or what’s left of it – but I got stuck on the second Y with only a handful of ridiculous or time consuming achievements left in my outstanding list. Enter Goosebumps: The Game with an easy achievement list, and a couple of achievements beginning with the letter Y to boot.

Goosebumps: The Game is a point and click adventure game where you get involved in having to stop all of R.L. Stine’s monsters who have escaped from their book-prisons. There are several really annoying things about playing the game and most of them are to do with navigation.

Every action you take is subject to narrative that appears at the bottom of the screen and prevents you from doing anything until you have clicked through the narrative. It comes up every time, even if you have already read said narrative several times when you need to revisit scenes, or get lost. I get that the game is based on a series of books but I don’t go back and read a previous page when I’m trying to get through the story.

Coupled with this, the navigation is clunky. You can get to new areas by either clicking on the correct corresponding, unmarked part of the screen – which is hard – or you can use the D-Pad. I know right? Something I forgot even exists in this analogue world we live in!

It reminds me a little bit of Discworld in terms of the inventory. You can pick up almost anything you want but that doesn’t mean it is of any use to you. At the end, I had nine pages of inventory which is just ridiculous. Some items have multiple uses too which is a tad different from most point and click adventure games of this type. I’m looking at you Artifex Mundi – why bin off my perfectly useful screwdriver after one use?!

Musically and graphically it’s not enjoyable and uninspiring. You don’t really notice it either because you are too busy reading and rereading all the narrative that comes with making your way around the game world.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

The easy achievements are only easy if you use a guide, otherwise some of them are fucking stupid which I will go into later. In order to get them all quickly you will need to strategically save and reload. The game is frustrating in this regard too as you only get the one save file, so if you get half way and want to make a checkpoint but start from your earlier save, you can’t.

For the main story you will get 14 achievements. The other 26 are missable and some of them are missable because they cross over with other achievements. Several examples of these are the mobile phone achievements. You have to call R.L. Stine from the payphone and using your phone after finding his number. You also have to download a song on to your phone or use a cassette player to play it. There are also achievements related to not using your phone at all throughout the playthrough and another for completing the game with a dead phone battery – but if you do this, somehow your in-game mother can still call you during the end game sequence.

There are a few other notable ones from my playthrough but probably the two biggest ones are for getting all the items in your inventory – of which there are 118 of the buggers – and, associated to this, for getting five items from the laundry chute. This is just fucking stupid. To get an item from the laundry chute, you have to drop an item down there, go from the chute to the laundry room, check the basket for the item and if its not the one you want, go back and do it again. You don’t get the five items you need in a row so you have to keep repeating this inane process, complete with narrative interference, over and over again until you get lucky. Dumb as fuck.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Goosebumps: The Game wasn’t fun, it felt a bit of a slog and it’s a clunky game. It did offer some light nostalgia but not enough to stop me having a negative opinion of the experience. I’m often asked why I persevere with unenjoyable games. I’ve seen a lot of people play games for five minutes to an hour and then not play them again but I don’t think you can form a subjective opinion over something in such a short time period. For me, a lot of gaming is trying new things and you have to see them through in order to learn if you enjoy them.